Battleship

• 1. Introduction

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  The battleship was the most feared weapon a nation could float. For roughly six decades, from the late 1880s to the end of World War II, these enormous armored warships defined what it meant to be a great power. Their guns could hurl shells weighing more than a ton across miles of open water. Their armor could absorb punishment that would sink almost any other vessel. And their presence in a harbor, or simply rumored to be nearby, could reshape the diplomatic calculations of entire governments. How did the sailing warship of earlier centuries evolve into these steel giants? What sent the world's navies into a series of frantic arms races to build more and bigger versions of them? And why, in the end, did aircraft finally succeed where critics, strategists, and rivals had all failed to stop them?

• 2. Wooden Walls and Shell Fire

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  A ship of the line in the age of sail could carry up to 120 guns and was powerful enough to wreck any wooden opponent with a single broadside. The term "battleship" actually traces directly to these ships: from 1794, the phrase "line of battle ship" was contracted first to "battle ship," and eventually to a single word. The Royal Navy lost no first-rate ship of the line to enemy action during the entire 18th century, which tells you something about the psychological weight these vessels carried.

  Steam arrived in stages. The French Navy introduced it to the line of battle with the 90-gun Napoleon in 1850, designed by Henri Dupuy de Lome. Napoleon could make 12 knots regardless of wind conditions. That reliability in a naval engagement was potentially decisive, and other navies took notice quickly.

  The truly transformative blow came from artillery. The French officer Henri-Joseph Paixhans had pioneered shell-firing guns beginning in 1809, and the American artillerist George Bomford designed the first shell-firing Columbiad in 1812. By the Crimean War of 1853-1855, the power of explosive shells was no longer theoretical. At the Battle of Sinop in 1853, six Russian ships of the line and two frigates destroyed seven Turkish frigates and three corvettes using explosive shells. That engagement shattered the credibility of wooden warships.

  Yet wood proved more durable than it seemed. At the 1866 Battle of Lissa, an Austrian steam ship of the line rammed an Italian ironclad, absorbed 80 hits from Italian ironclads including at least one 300-pound shot at point-blank range, lost her bowsprit and foremast, caught fire, and was still ready for action the following day. That survivor reflex of wood gave naval architects pause before they abandoned it entirely.

• 3. The Ironclad Era

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  Napoleon III ordered the first ironclad warships after the combined lessons of Sinop and the Anglo-French blockade of Sevastopol from 1854 to 1855. Three of these vessels led the attack on the Russian fortress at Kinburn in 1855. They absorbed the brunt of Russian artillery fire without serious damage, and that success accelerated ironclad programs in France and Britain alike.

  In March 1858 the French began work on Gloire, another design by Dupuy de Lome, which launched in 1859 and prompted Napoleon III to order five more. Britain responded with a similar but much larger ironclad featuring an iron hull. By the time that British ship was completed in 1861, nine more ironclads were already under construction in British shipyards, some of them converted from screw battleships already being built.

  The American Civil War settled any remaining doubts about ironclads. News of the Battle of Hampton Roads in March 1862, fought between the Union and Confederate ironclads, firmly ended debate in favor of even larger construction programs. Spain, Russia, the United States, and the Confederate States all ordered ironclads in 1861. During the Unification of Italy in 1860, the Kingdom of Sardinia ordered ironclads from French shipyards, and the Austrian Empire quickly ordered two of its own.

  The pace of change during the ironclad decades was punishing. Ships became obsolete before they were finished. In the continuous contest between gun manufacturers and armor makers, calibers climbed to extraordinary sizes: the British carried guns of 16.25 inches in diameter, while the Italian ships mounted colossal 17.7-inch guns. The French experimented with very large guns in the 1870s but suffered enough trouble with them that they pivoted instead to smaller-caliber guns with longer barrels. Higher muzzle velocity meant greater penetration, and that discovery pointed the way toward the next generation of warships.

• 4. Pre-Dreadnoughts and the Arms Race

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  In 1889, the British government passed the Naval Defence Act, launching a construction program aimed at the two-power standard: the Royal Navy would be stronger than the next two largest navies combined. The resulting eight-ship class is considered the first group of vessels recognizable as "pre-dreadnought battleships." They carried four 13.5-inch guns in two twin mounts, fore and aft, which set the pattern for every battleship that followed.

  Foreign navies moved quickly. France started building in 1889. Germany laid down four ships in 1890. The United States laid down three in 1891. Japan ordered two from British yards in 1894. The Austro-Hungarian Navy began its own program in 1899. Armor technology evolved just as fast as the ships themselves: compound armor gave way to Harvey armor, developed in the United States in 1890, which was in turn overtaken by German Krupp armor in 1894. As armor strengthened, its thickness could be reduced, freeing weight for larger guns and higher speeds.

  By the 1890s, the building contest between Britain and Germany had hardened into a genuine arms race. German naval laws in 1890 and 1898 authorized a fleet of 38 battleships, a direct threat to British maritime supremacy. In 1883, the United Kingdom had 38 ironclad battleships, roughly twice as many as France and nearly as many as the rest of the world combined. By 1897, that lead had narrowed substantially against competition from France, Germany, Russia, the United States, Italy, and Japan.

  Pre-dreadnoughts finally saw action in 1898 at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba during the Spanish-American War, where an American squadron including four of them blockaded and then destroyed a Spanish squadron of four armored cruisers. The medium-caliber guns seemed to have done most of the damage, which told naval planners the mixed battery was working. Then came Tsushima in 1905.

• 5. Tsushima and the Birth of the Dreadnought

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  At the Battle of the Yellow Sea during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, the fleets engaged at ranges as far as 11,000 meters, where only the 12-inch guns proved effective. A single 12-inch shell struck the Russian flagship, killed the squadron commander, and sent the Russian ships into disarray. The medium-caliber guns were useless at those distances. At Tsushima, Admiral Togo Heihachiro outmaneuvered the Russian Second Pacific Squadron and his battleships quickly inflicted fatal damage at long range. Only in the final stages, after most of the Russian fleet had already been sunk or disabled, did the Japanese close to within 2,500 meters, where their secondary batteries could finally engage. Those two battles made the lesson unavoidable: the large-caliber gun had to be the only offensive weapon.

  Vittorio Cuniberti, the chief engineer of the Italian navy, had already published an article in 1903 in Jane's Fighting Ships titled "An Ideal Battleship for the British Navy." His argument anticipated what the Russo-Japanese War would prove. When Admiral Sir John Fisher became First Sea Lord in late 1904, he had already concluded that a fast capital ship carrying the largest quick-firing guns was the future. Fisher actually preferred a large armored cruiser with an all-big-gun armament, what would come to be called the battlecruiser, and included a conventional battleship in his 1905 program mostly to satisfy officers who still wanted one.

  That battleship, completed first among all the all-big-gun designs under construction around the world, was HMS Dreadnought. She carried ten 12-inch guns in twin turrets and abandoned the medium-caliber secondary battery entirely. Her name instantly became a category. Every modern battleship thereafter was a "dreadnought," and every ship that had come before was a "pre-dreadnought." Reactions from other naval powers were immediate. Very few pre-dreadnoughts were built afterward. In the first seven years of the arms race that followed, every major naval power either had dreadnoughts in service or nearing completion.

• 6. Jutland and Stalemate

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  By the start of World War I in July 1914, Britain's Grand Fleet outnumbered the German High Seas Fleet 21 to 13 in dreadnought battleships. Over the course of the war, Britain would add another 14 dreadnoughts while Germany completed 6 more. German strategy assumed Britain would launch an immediate offensive into the southern North Sea. Instead, the British imposed a distant blockade, which rapidly strangled German maritime trade. Both sides understood that a full fleet engagement would likely end in British victory, so Germany tried to force a battle on favorable terms: isolating part of the Grand Fleet, or fighting near German minefields and submarine positions that could even the odds.

  The resulting Battle of Jutland on the 31st of May - the 1st of June 1916 was the largest clash of battleship fleets in history. Three British battlecruisers were destroyed in the fighting, along with one German battlecruiser and an old pre-dreadnought. The British crossed the German "T" twice, but darkness allowed the German fleet to disengage and reach port by the morning of the 1st of June. Neither side achieved the decisive result that naval doctrine had promised.

  After two further inconclusive operations, the Germans concluded their strategy had failed and turned to unrestricted submarine warfare. Battleships were reduced to guarding U-boat bases. Pre-dreadnoughts proved catastrophically vulnerable to mines and torpedoes throughout the war: one was sunk by a German U-boat in the English Channel in 1915, others were lost at the Dardanelles, and French battleships were sunk by U-boats in 1916 and 1917. Dreadnoughts, by contrast, proved far more resilient; losses to underwater attack were rare, and ships that were torpedoed often managed to return to port. The Italian Navy demonstrated what small craft could achieve: Italian frogmen sank the Austro-Hungarian flagship in harbor using a powerful limpet mine.

• 7. Treaties, Technology, and the Fast Battleship

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  In June 1919, the interned German fleet at Scapa Flow was scuttled by its own crews to prevent the ships from being handed to the Allies. The surviving vessels in German ports were seized as compensation. With postwar economies exhausted and politicians unwilling to fund another naval arms race, the major naval powers concluded the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922. It limited the number and size of battleships, imposed a ten-year building holiday, and fixed a ratio of 5:5:3 on total battleship displacement for the United States, Britain, and Japan. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance was also severed by the agreement. The First London Naval Treaty in 1930 and the Second in 1936 added further restrictions.

  Fewer new battleships were launched in 1919-1939 than in 1905-1914. The treaty system also blocked promising designs: the projected British ship, the first American design of the period, and a Japanese ship that would have continued the trend toward larger guns and thicker armor were never built. The ships that were commissioned became known as treaty battleships.

  Japan's decision in 1936 not to sign the Second London Naval Treaty triggered the collapse of the whole framework, and the agreement expired in January 1937. Britain began the King George V class, laid down in 1937. The United States began building its own new class at the same time, initially intended for 14-inch guns but upgraded to 16-inch when Japan refused to sign. In 1939, four more American battleships followed, and in 1940, four more again. Japan, which had secretly decided as early as 1934 to build four very large ships armed with 18-inch guns, began work on the first of that class in late 1937. That ship would be Yamato.

• 8. Aircraft, the Pacific, and the End

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  As early as 1914, British Admiral Percy Scott had predicted that aircraft would make battleships irrelevant. Between 1916 and 1918, US Admiral William Fullam published papers arguing that aircraft would become an independent fleet strike arm. In 1921, General Billy Mitchell used the captured German dreadnought Ostfriesland in bombing tests to make his case. Mitchell broke the rules of the tests and the official report concluded that a crewed, maneuvering ship firing back at the aircraft could have contained the damage. Mitchell nonetheless launched a public campaign claiming he had proved battleships were obsolete, which eventually led to his court martial and discharge.

  On the 7th of December 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor sank or destroyed five American battleships. Three days later, land-based Japanese aircraft operating from French Indochina caught and sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse off the coast of British Malaya. The sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse was a milestone: it was the first time aircraft had sunk capital ships that were maneuvering and returning fire.

  At the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, battleships still played a central role. During the Battle of Surigao Strait, American battleships repaired after Pearl Harbor defeated a Japanese force that included two battleships of its own. Yamato's end came during the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945, sent on a suicide mission to attack the Allied landing beaches. American aircraft scored between nine and thirteen torpedo hits and six bomb hits on the ship before she sank. The formal Japanese surrender took place aboard the battleship Missouri in September 1945, and all four Iowa-class ships were struck from the Naval Vessel Register in 1995. In September 1983, when Druze militia in Lebanon fired upon U.S. Marine peacekeepers, the arrival of USS New Jersey alone stopped the firing, a final demonstration of the psychological weight these ships had carried for more than a century.